What's New In SOPA™

Not all features described below are available in all SOPA sites. When your site is upgraded to
1.5.2, you will see these. In the meantime, know that we have coded and tested them, and they are coming!

Along with feedback-enabling your checklists, and starting to record whether feedback was provided
for specific behaviors on the checklist, there will now be two new buttons on the Chart and Data Selection window for those of
you collecting feedback data:
Feedback Given (which rank orders behaviors with the highest feedback rate) and
Feedback Trend, which allows you to track
how the feedback rate is trending up or down over time.

You can now export the data from the Comments and Concerns report to Excel.

There's a new button on the individual employee profile to let you transfer that
employee to another committee (We are happy to do this for you if you're uncomfortable
with it, but some companies like to do it themselves instead of waiting for us).
We're hoping this puts an end
to the unfortunate practice of creating a new "persona"
in the other committee, since there should only be one. This situation
resulted in observations being spread over several instances of the same employee,
which was confusing and
was a type of database corruption.

You can now record, for each behavior on a checklist, whether or not feedback was given.
A Pareto Chart similar to "safes" or "concerns" will show the behaviors getting the most attention in
the observation and feedback process. And like "safes" and "concerns", you can drilldown to see the comments
made about the behavior. A very useful function, and very behavioral. We know that behavior is
sensitive to its consequences, including the feedback given to the employee after an observation. Of
course it's best to "catch them being good" but corrective feedback (as long as it's done rarely and
correctly) is needed too.

The Training Report now has an additional toggle button so that you can see the report with or
without personnel names.

The Participation and Recognition can now be grouped by department, as well as
ordered by name or by total observations.

When designing the new Recognition report, it seemed to us to be unfair to
penalize someone's "consecutive month" streak when they go on vacation. So the
months that have been identified as "vacation" (for any portion of them) count
differently: if the observer meets the monthly criterion of observations
anyway, the month counts in the ongoing consecutive month streak, but if not,
then the month is simply skipped and the consecutive string is the same at the
this month as it was at the end of the previous month. It would not
be reset.

The new calendar, Datepicker, has been integrated with the code and is now
being tested. It replaces the old "cfcalendar" in five places in SOPA:

when entering data,

when choosing a date range on the Charts and Data Selection screen,

when choosing a date range for Stored Observations,

when entering a vacation date range,

when entering a due date for an Action Item.

Datepicker works under almost ALL web browsers. In the past, we could only
support Internet Explorer and Firefox, because those two browsers supported
Flash. Datepicker does not require Flash, which means that you can use Chrome,
Safari, or any others. It also allows us to produce a data entry version to
run on handheld and mobile devices like tablets.

We have improved the way you can produce a recognition schedule to be
displayed in the Participation and Recognition report. The Policies
page now has spaces for entering rewards for up to 12 consecutive months
at or above the criterion. Any of those "rewards" that are not empty
become a de facto part of the reward schedule. If there are any
employees who qualify for one of those rewards, their name will be added to
the appropriate list on the Recognition report. Reinforcement for good
safe behavior is a key part of your safety process!

SOPA For BBS 1.5 has been released. All new installations are going up
in 1.5, and one at a time, our existing clients are being upgraded. Reserve your slot
on the conversion list NOW!

Our first Spanish site has been installed for a manufacturer in Mexico.

The new Participation and Recognition Report is incorporated in 1.5. It produces
a "scorecard" for each employee.

The new Chart and Data Selection screen makes it easier to produce charts
for parametric studies. Most of the values there are "sticky" so that you don't
have to reset everything if you just want to perform the same analysis on different
units.

Along with the new C&DS screen, charts are displayed in a separate window so they
don't disturb your chart settings, and it gives you more room to see your results.

Some comments by observers contain actionable suggestions. You can now tag the ones that
you want to turn into action items, and a new report, Action Items, allows you to manage those,
assign them and track completion relative to due dates.

All charts can now export their x and y values along with identifiers to Microsoft Excel, in case
you want a different looking chart than the one SOPA produces.

There is a new chart that allows you to see how observations are distributed across the days of the week.